A clearing procedure as a niching method for genetic algorithms

The clearing procedure is a niching method inspired by the principle stated by J.H. Holland (1975) - that of sharing limited resources within subpopulations of individuals characterized by some similarities - but instead of evenly sharing the available resources among the individuals of a subpopulation, the clearing procedure supplies these resources only to the best individuals of each subpopulation. The clearing is naturally adapted to elitist strategies. This can significantly improve the performance of genetic algorithms (GAs) applied to multimodal optimization. Moreover, the clearing procedure allows a GA to efficiently reduce the genetic drift when used with an appropriate selection operator. Some experimental results are presented for a massively multimodal deceptive function optimization.